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Orenstein, Peggy. Flux.
This book examines women's beliefs and attitudes towards work, children, and sex in the 21st century. Annotation Orenstein, Peggy. Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love, and Life in a Half-Changed World. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Print. Quotes and Notes ...from Introduction “And on Caroline in the City Lea Thompson ponders a marriage proposal this way: ‘I envision myself in a house in Connecticut, driving the three kids to soccer. I don’t know if it’s a dream come true or my worst nightmare.’” (4) Example of maternal ambivalence “Like the women I interviewed, as well as those disjointed Hollywood heroines, I had long vacillated between two visions of womanhood, each posing a conflict between relationships and the self. There was the Good Woman, who earns approval by giving to those around her at the expense of her own needs, and there was the New Woman, who pursues her own desires but risks ending up alone...To me, the Good Woman was my mother. Unlike the frustrated housewife-moms of many of the women I spoke with, she loved being a caretaker. She raised my two brothers and me, nursed her parents in their old age, and still keeps in touch with a broad network of family and friends, remembering birthdays, anniversaries, deaths, and other milestones. The New Woman was me. By the late 1970s, when I was a teenager, girls were expected to stake our identity on achievement instead of on family roles. We were, as sociologist Rush Sidel has said, the New American Dreamers, convinced that we had no limitations. As much as I loved my mom, I knew I didn't want to be like her. In fact, I quickly came to see anything that smacked of conventional feminine behavior--from motherhood to female-dominated professions--as retrograde, a threat to my new-found selfhood, unthinkable.” (5) Was her mom truly that into her mother/caretaker role? Or did Orenstein just imagine that she was? Or did she perform that way, feeling it was the only way she would be accepted at the time? Were there really no moments when she didn’t feel doubt, regret, or frustration over the decision to have children? ...from Chapter One “‘Yes!’ exclaims Claire. ‘I’ve got this absolute phobia about looking back and thinking, “Shit, I picked the wrong one.” Like, I don’t want to be married now, I don’t want to have a baby now, but I don’t want to be eight years down the road thinking, I blew it! I had every choice in the world, I couldn’t done anything, been anyone, gone anywhere, and somehow I still managed to be thirty-six going “I didn’t get what I wanted!”’” (Orenstein’s emphasis, 17) “‘And I realized that all the men had envisioned themselves in those places. I think I took my career less seriously. In the back of my mind I was thinking, “I can’t get too high up, I can’t have too much responsibility, because then what happens if I want to take a couple years off and have kids?”’” (20) “Jennifer, the twenty-four-year-old social worker in New York, sums it up when she says with no hint of irony, ‘I want to have kids, I just don’t want them in my life.’” (33) “‘So I have this feeling of, “Oh, my God, do I have to make a choice? Why can’t I have both things?” I see women at my advertising agency who have made it. They are not having kids until they are forty, or they have a full-time nanny. More and more I see women just leave. And I wonder, how am I going to be able to accept staying home, spending time with the kids, and not making it to that next level? Is that going to be good enough for me?’” (36) ...from Chapter Five “Ever the poised professional, she had burst into tears. I reach for the phone. ‘I can’t believe that my life revolves around sippy cups,’ she tells me. ‘I mean, I love my kids, but between working and taking care of them, I never get fifteen minutes for myself. I’m always in a hurry. I’m always exhausted.’” (96) Loss of self-identity independent of her children “‘One of my college roommates just had a baby,’ she explains. ‘We went through late adolescence and early adulthood together, started graduate school at the same time. Now she’s sailed into this motherhood thing. So, suddenly I’m thinking, “Wait, shouldn’t I be doing this too?” And I don’t know: A child would add a whole different dimension of experience to my life, but I don’t know if I really want to have one, or if it’s just that I think I’m supposed to. How do you separate what you want from what is expected of you?’” (104) “Their ambivalence pivoted on a lack of conviction that even under the best circumstances...they could navigate motherhood with their essential selves intact. ‘I worry that I couldn’t be selfless enough to be a mother,’ she says, ‘not that you have to be totally selfless. But my mother was.’” (106) “Although they recoiled from the silence of the Good Wife, they embraced the Perfect Mother--the woman for whom childrearing supersedes all other identities and satisfactions, whose needs are either relinquished to or become identical to her child’s--but they’d given her a modern spin: In a melding of feminist and feminine ideologies, they believed the best way to assert and nurture the self was through submerging it in a child, ignoring the fact that mothers’ and children’s needs often conflict. The cost of that contradiction could be enormous. In retrospect, women told me, they believed they’d overidealized motherhood, which set them up for what writer SUsan Maushart calls ‘baby shock.’ ‘Before you have a child, you only hear how great it is,’ says a thirty-four-year-old office manager and mother of two in St. Paul. ‘Now if a woman said to me, “What’s it like?” I would tell her everything, for sure. “It’s going to be stressful, and it’s going to be hard. Sometimes you are going to want to say, ‘You know what? I don’t even want to be here. I don’t like my kid. I don’t like my husband. I want to go.’ There will be a lot of changes you don’t expect: financially, professionally, and emotionally. And lots of changes in your marriage.”’” (107) “Her husband has stayed more involved than Jill expected, but once she stopped traveling, she slowly reasserted authority. ‘I’m not a very good delegator,’ she admits. ‘But the truth is, it would still be scary for me to give those things up. I’d be scared he wouldn’t do things right because--’ She breaks off, searching for an example. ‘Okay,’ she continues, ‘one day he dropped our oldest daughter off at a Brownie event where I thought lunch would be provided. It wasn’t. Luckily, the troop leader worked something out for her, but I cried that night. I kept thinking, “What a failure I am as a mother to not even think of what my daughter is going to eat for lunch.”’ Jill looks at me, to make sure I understand what she’s saying. ‘I didn’t think “He’s a bad father,”’ she emphasizes. ‘I didn’t blame him. I feel like if my house is messy or my kids don’t have clean clothes, people are going to judge me.’...The phrase ‘Bad Mother’ affects women like kryptonite. It’s one of the most effective checks against women pushing for fuller lives. The Bad Mother risks damaging her children through independent needs and outside interests, such as a profession. She is the evil twin of the Perfect Mother who lives solely for her children, whose needs are completely in sync with theirs. For me, the most poignant illustration of the Perfect-Mother bind was among the mothers of girls: Not only did they feel vulnerable to self-recrimination, scrutiny by other mothers, and societal reproach, they fretted over how their daughters would someday judge their choices. In this Perfect-Mother permutation, women had to be nurturing, ever available, and all empathic, while at the same time being the opposite: credible models of autonomy and professional accomplishment. Understandably they projected their own anxieties onto their daughters. I wondered, since the mothers of sons seemed to worry less about modeling female independence, whether the more conventional expectations of boys were being perpetuated as well. ‘The fact that I’ll have a daughter makes me want to concentrate on my career again,’ says Eleanor Hwang in Philadelphia, who is seven months pregnant. Eleanor stayed home with her son, but she’s unsure of whether that’s the right course with a girl. ‘My husband is my son’s role model,’ she explains, ‘but I’ll be hers and I want to set a good example. I don’t want her to consider me old-fashioned or dependent. I’m so scared she’ll be the opposite of what I want her to be. But then, I’m really ambivalent about what she should be.’” (Orenstein's emphasis 112-113) Any failures in childcare are blamed on the mother, regardless of what role the father has taken or says that he will take. The lunch error and self-blaming reminds me of the GoGurt commercial where, even though they dad is supposed to pack the child’s lunch, the mother still has to go into the kitchen beforehand, leaving sticky notes everywhere to make sure he “gets it right.” I’m sorry, but the irony of “Dad’s who get it, get GoGurt” tagline is killing me. Assuming this is a heteronormative commercial (like pretty much every commercial about children’s products or cleaning products EVER), then it’s really the MOM who “gets it,” i.e. the child’s wants/desires. She must orchestrate an elaborate ritual to instruct the father on what the child wants and/or needs, which the commercial implies he is oblivious to. If it was a homosexual male couple, dad instructing dad via sticky notes, then the tagline makes sense. Otherwise, the father remains ignorant and forgetful as far as the “lunch packing” ritual goes, what this includes and where things are, because this is not something he has to do every day like the mother does. So, no, he doesn’t get it. But Mom does, and she also gets the fact that Dad doesn’t get it. “‘I remember reading in a women’s studies class about this whole fifties paradigm of how couples became Mrs. Inside, Mr. Outside,’ says Faye, who was a teacher before her son was born. ‘It was supposed to be very uncool. Now I am Mrs. Inside, and my husband is Mr. Outside. But there is a way that we are valuing the Mrs. Inside even if it’s just in my little inner circle of friends and in my relationship. Mrs. Inside is worth more than people think.’” (117-118) “Gena, who is sitting across the room from Faye, nods thoughtfully. ‘I had this epiphany the other day,’ she says. ‘Both kids were in bed with me, and I was looking at them. It had been one of those days where I was just beating myself up because I don’t produce anything tangible, and I can’t even keep a house clean. The kitchen was a mess. I had finished only one load of wash, and I didn’t even put it away. So, I was lying in bed and looking at these two little boys, and my epiphany was “This isn’t such a bad product to produce. This is pretty great. I have these cute little babies, and they are healthy.” But sometimes it’s hard to sustain that feeling.’” (118-119) “Righting that balance may involve acknowledging the labor of stay-at-home moms, but it goes well beyond that. It includes a reevaluation of the pay scale of childcare providers and teachers, of the structure of corporations, of the faux family-friendly policies of government. It demands that men become primary in their children’s lives. It challenges women to develop a new vision of satisfaction, one that goes beyond either career or family as the central source of identity. It requires a more expansive definition of motherhood that does not continually pit a woman’s well-being against her child’s needs. Those are points, perhaps, upon which both women who work and those who stay home can agree.” (119-120) ...from Chapter Six “Ambivalence, particularly over motherhood, is a fluid thing, uncomfortable to live with both personally and culturally.” (121-122) “What if I’d told the woman the truth? That I love children, but there is a chasm between the abstract idea of having kids and the three-dimensional reality of what it means to mother…34, the ambivalence that had in part inspired me to write this book had only grown sharper...It wasn’t that I felt any internal alarms going off; my life actually felt pretty complete. I loved having time, time to make last-minute plans with a friend--to see a friend--to go away for the weekend, or just to dash out to the grocery store without worrying about childcare...I fretted over what parenthood would do to my marriage...If we became parents, who’d mind the baby?...Sometimes...I felt my heart swell with the notion of Steven as a father, of watching him with our child. Other times it felt like a loss. Maybe I was too selfish to be a mother. Or maybe I just appreciated what I had.” (Orenstein’s emphasis 126) “In my interviews I’d begun to notice the phrase ‘do it right’ cropping up, as in ‘if I’m going to be a mother, I want to “do it right.”’ That meant, as Mandy Warner, thirty-three, a business consultant in San Jose, California, said, ‘getting over the whole overachiever thing so I’ll be able to stay home and focus on my kid.’ Mandy saw her ‘achieving’ impulse as bad, as ‘over,’ inappropriate, certainly incompatible with the sacrifice required of the Good Mother.” (127) “I’d developed my own image of the Good Mother, who ‘did it right,’ and she looked a lot like my own mom--someone who was satisfied as a mother and wife, who was happy supporting others, making her mark through the accomplishments of those she nurtured. It’s a sacrifice that shes insisted was no sacrifice. I knew I couldn’t be that kind of mother, yet, like the women I interviewed, I felt like hers was the ‘right’ way to do it. I feared devolving into a conflicted, discontented version of her, becoming a person who lost her essential self in motherhood while trying in vain to ‘do it right.’ Perhaps, because of that, I minimized the rewards of caretaking, nurturing, even cleaning and cooking, seeing them only as burdens that subtracted from my identity, siphoned off from the independent life I’d worked so hard to create. I realized that like some of the more ambitious young women I’d interviewed, I’d seen the feminine as weak, and thought it was feminist to do so. In that sense, though, I was capitulating to the Good Mother rather than trying to reinvent her in a new, more balanced way. Was it possible to be a mother without being a Mother? In an interview, Gloria Steinem, who is childless, once said, ‘I’m not sure I would have been strong enough to have children, to live that life, and come out the other end with an identity of my own. The way I came to think of it was that I could not give birth to both myself and someone else.’” (127-128) This is problematic in that the Good Mother becomes reduced down to one aspect of her identity. I’m sure that Orenstein’s mother is more complex than that, and that even mothers who DO stay home and put a lot of effort into their children don’t become completely “personless.” I’m sure they still experience ambivalence and frustration, but they feel pressure to hide it more because, as stay at home moms, you’re supposed to care fully, entirely about your children and their well being. To suggestion otherwise would give them the label “Bad Mother,” and the stigma would be significantly heightened given their role/job in the household. “On October 31, three weeks shy of my thirty-fifth birthday, there was a message on my machine from a friend. ‘Listen,’ she yelled. I could barely hear her over the shrieking of her sons, whom, I assumed, were practicing their goblin arpeggios for Halloween. I was wrong. They were actually throwing simultaneous tantrums. ‘I want you to hear this,’ she continues, ‘so you’ll know what it’s really like to have kids and not feel so bad.’...Occasionally she has asked me why I was even contemplating motherhood. I always brushed her off. ‘You love being a mom,’ I’d say. ‘You wouldn’t give it up for anything.’...’I do,’ she said when I called her back, ‘but you hear these women say “motherhood is the most fulfilling thing.” You know what I say? Bullshit. It’s fulfilling. It’s rewarding. There’s absolutely nothing that makes my heart melt like when my children look up at me with their big brown eyes. But it’s not the most fulfilling. THere’s no one thing that can be the most fulfilling.’ That was an important reminder in a culture that often tells women just the opposite.” (132)